Putting my Cart before my Horse, or my Horse before my Cart

I’ve already shown that I put family before work. I chose to quit my job to stay at home. When things aren’t working at home I give up things I am working on outside of the house. This does not make me a good candidate for any job. But is it only because I haven’t ever had a job that I feel is as fulfilling as what I do at home? I’m a good people person when it comes to co-workers or a team. I am not a good people person with the general public, that pretty much rules out any type of job that helps people. So then what else could there be that makes me feel as good supporting my family if its not helping others? Any thing to help the environment requires either a lot of traveling, or relocation for long periods of time. Unless I want to crunch numbers at a desk, which I don’t. Developing alternative energy sources seems unappealing as a job to me. That leaves only jobs that have nothing to do with helping others. Only entertaining them.

What does a job do for me? Well there is a pride that comes with receiving that paycheck you earned all by yourself. Only it won’t be by myself because it will require day care, probably a housekeeper, and spousal support. There is a sense of fulfillment to be recognized for your abilities other than house cleaning, errand running, cooking, and building a fort out of the dining room furniture and sheets. Yet most of that comes from how other people perceive me. You can’t have a conversation when you are a stay at home mom with another person without some sort of criticism about your life. Everyone thinks they can do what I do now. Hardly anyone believed they could design a computer processor with 8 cores, each supporting 4 threads enabling it to execute 32 simultaneous threads only consuming 72 watts of power (it rocked). So a large part of my life was untouchable. No one had an opinion, well no one knew what I was talking about. It felt good. Now everyone has an opinion on almost every aspect of my life. It sucks.

That’s why I’m doing this. That’s my motivation. To work on something a good part of the day, and get more than one positive comment at least every other month. My positive comment count so far this year: 2. And if you can count them its not enough.